2018’s Scariest Trend: The Increase of Streamed Gaming

Though game streaming seems to be the future, and it could also portend some severe problems.

Published initially during E3 2018 after plans by several developers to push toward streamed gaming. The rumor of the development of a streaming Xbox with the regular next-gen console by Microsoft necessitated the need to republish this article.

Though E3 2018 embodied unclearly defined references to the rise of streamed gaming, EA made a push-toward announcement at its press conference. The statements by both Microsoft and EA came hot on the heels of the sudden release of Resident Evil 7: Cloud Version, which was a wholly streamed gaming that presumably wouldn’t have been quickly and natively run on the Switch’s hardware.

This general push toward streaming games to devices rather than running them natively paints a strange and kind of scary vision of the likely gaming future. Streaming has been thought to become more accessible to many players, thereby making it not necessary to have big hardware at home.

This implies we won’t require consoles having in them superior hardware as we can stream, from a cloud service, all of our games — as in Resident Evil 7, and just like the enabling of EA with its new streaming options. PlayStation Now is now a decently reliable service, as there’s a keen interest for it from significant companies.

Exceptional access to game that is of high quality and cheaper systems are excellent, but that’s only when they work.

Even though they are not the same, an instance like being able to stream to your Vita from your PlayStation, from your Xbox to your PC, or even from your PC to your phone through the Steam Link app, they do not work well. Online streaming services such as GameFly (an afterthought development by EA) failed to get real success in the past. However, newer services like Shadow are trying with the better tech behind them. EA even asserted during its E3 announcement the unreadiness of their services for a full market prime time.

Resident Evil 7 on Switch only works with your internet connection, with “always-online” requirements. Otherwise single-player games still consistently have issues and hiccups — mainly if your connection is slow. Game preservation seems to be a massive issue, which will worsen the problem.

Have you ever thought what will happen when you have your subscription canceled? Or when the particular subscription service terminates its servers in two decades? Or your licensing agreement expires, and you are not allowed to play your favorite game?

Lots of incredibly famous online-only games have been shut down in the past with no fault on them. With streamed gaming becoming the norm, the fate for single-player games is sealed. Imagine if your copy of Breath of the Wild or God of War refuses to work again in about ten years’ time.

People have thought some periods to be the last console generation, and they’ve been seeking to get game streaming to work for as long as possible.

Game streaming affords good fortune when done correctly. Some people gate out of playing amazing games merely because they can’t provide the hardware. However, it appears as this shift will eventually hurt gamers more than the benefits it gives them if it works at all.